


Somatosensory

by akire_yta



Series: prompt ficlets [408]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:43:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9074464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akire_yta/pseuds/akire_yta
Summary: thebaconsandwichofregret asked: John and Hugs?





	1. Chapter 1

“Oh, John’s not a hugger.”

John’s steps slowed to a halt at the sound of Scott’s voice, speaking authoritatively on the other side of the doorway.  They were home in Kansas for the first time in years, but John still remembered to step over the floorboard that squeaked as he inched closer to the half-closed door.

“Yeah,” and that was Virgil, warm but still confident in his statement.  “Just imagine there’s, like, a  no man’s land for about two feet around him, and you’ll be fine.”

He could hear cousin’s twittering to themselves as they giggled, the heavy sigh of their aunt however many times removed.  “Good to know, boys, thanks.”

John sat through the rest of the holiday watching as everyone bounced off the invisible shields his brothers had set up before careening off to hug someone else.  He tried to break it down, but when he held his hand out to Grandma’s sister, she waved him off and leaned on Alan’s shoulder instead.

John backed off, feeling that deep pain in his chest again.

It was getting harder to ignore.  The truth was, he wasn’t much of a hugger; he didn’t randomly collide into people like Alan did, with the expectation of an easy return of affection.  He couldn’t casually sling an arm over someone like Virgil did, and he never managed to get the hang of the way Gordon and Scott could walk through a room, shaking hands and clapping shoulders in easy comradery.

That didn’t mean he wanted everyone to keep strictly two feet away from him at all times.

His mother used to hug him all the time, but she was gone now, and as the years piled up, John could feel that ripple under his skin more and more, that primeval ache for the nearness of another human being who wanted to be there just as much as John wanted them there.

But the more everyone kept their distance, the more John curled in around that ache in his chest.  And the more it hurt, the more people seemed to think that was his way of wanting more space, and so they cycle repeated until John could finally escape once more into the solitude of orbit, where there were no other people to make his skin tingle and his heart ache to close the impassible distance between them.


	2. Eight months four days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there were MULTIPLE requests for someone to give him a hug

Eight months, four days.

He hadn’t meant to start counting,  In a fit of morbid curiousity, he’d worked it out a few weeks before, and now the counter ticked by in his head, day after day.

Eight months, four days since Brains’ friend Moffie had given him an excited quick little hug at the astrophysics symposia before she had been whisked away to prepare for her keynote.  Eight months, four days since he’d sat in the auditorium and watched her bounce energetically around the stage.  He hadn’t heard a word over the fizzing under his skin.

He couldn’t remember anyone else coming close to him since.

To be fair, a large proportion of those eight months had been spent in orbit, but to also be fair, John had done a lot more trips on the space elevator than he normally would in any scheduled eight month period.  There had been crises, like with Three and the asteroid and half a dozen others, where there was nothing to do on Five and so John had tried to be with his family instead.

That was his excuse anyway, to go down over and over again.

Perhaps it balanced out, he wasn’t sure.  He didn’t feel he could trust his own judgement to remain impartial on this matter any more.

He was due to go down tonight, a scheduled trip.  There were a dozen of these, scattered across the calendar by the GDF flight surgeon who signed off on space operations licenses.  He was expected to return home tonight.

Everyone would be there.  He knew their movements intimately, could pinpoint any of them at any time at any point on the globe.

He wasn’t losing anyone else.

But that meant a house full of the people he cared about most in the world skirting around him like there was a forcefield bubble around his body.  The tingling under his skin had turned to razors, the sensation of slow scraping so clear he sometimes almost expected to see the shape of the blades pressing out from under his skin.  He was hyperaware of the texture of his uniform, the faintest current of cool air from the vent behind him, the way his hair tugged slightly against inertia with every small movement of his head.

Worst of all, he could feel the now-constant prickling pressure behind his eyes and over his heart start to build again.

John pushed away from the airlock down to the elevator, a violent explosion of motion that had him cannonballing back up the length of Five.  

“John?” Eos asked as John finally came to rest against the clear glass of the ring.

“Just give me a minute,” he replied, pressing his forehead onto the cool clearness.  This side of the station was facing out, the Earth to his left and the moon to his right, both too far to touch.

“You are expected on the Island at 1700 hours local time,” she reminded him pointedly.

“But not wanted,” he muttered, pushing off the edge of the ring and letting his momentum carry him, slower this time.

Eos closed the airlock before he got there.  “If you do not want to go, I can engineer a suitably scaled incident to give you an excuse not to attend.”

John let his fingers splay across the iris of the airlock, feeling how the pieces interlocked together.  “Tempting,” he admitted, feeling a wave of fondness for her voice.  “But just delaying the inevitable.”  He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the sharpness of unintended knives.  “Open the airlock, Eos.”

* * *

John made it from the anchor all the way up to the house without encountering another person.  He changed slowly, dragging out the seconds until the inevitable. Despite the warmth, he chose long sleeves, long pants, covering himself from neck to knuckles, wincing against the feel of natural fabric against his skin.  

He liked to think it helped, to be completely covered.

Finally, he couldn’t put it off any longer, trudging out through the common areas towards the noise of conversation on the deck. “Hey, there he is,” Virgil greeted him with a wave of his barbecue tongs, not moving from his post behind the grill.

The smell of smoke and meat was cloying after weeks in perfect climate control, and John steered wide around the grill with an answering wave.

There was a seat next to grandma at the table under the umbrella, and he sank into it gratefully, already tired. Grandma reached out as if to pat his hand, but at the last moment rattled her fingers along the armrest next to his hand instead.  “Are you okay, John?”

He managed a weak smile.  “Long day.”

She sat back, studying him from under the brim of her hat.  “I worry about you, all alone up there,” she said.

John shrugged and reached for a drink to have something to do with his hands.

 * * *

Eight months, five days.

John was up before dawn, unable to sleep easily without the hum of Five’s systems providing the lullaby.

The pool was surprisingly empty, the water cool as he slid off the ledge into the deep end.  He intended to swim laps, but found himself on his back, paddling softly as he stared up at the changing colours of the sky as seen from this side of the clouds.

It was just as beautiful below as above.

“Cannon ball!”  The quiet call was the only warning he had before a body hit the water next to him at speed, the splash enough to roll him over in the wash.

John came up, spluttering water out of his nose.  Kayo was treading water, grinning like a cat.  John grinned back, and splashed her.  “What was that for?”

She shrugged, sinking backwards to let the water take her weight.  “You left yourself open for that, and you know it.”

John mimicked her posture, the two of them bobbing with the currents still swirling from Kayo’s dramatic entrance.  “A man can’t innocently float in his own pool?”

Kayo shrugged unapologetically.  “No such thing as an innocent man,” she parried, her hands waving slowly back and forth across the surface to hold her in place.  “You okay?” she added.  “You seem quiet.  Even more than usual, I mean,” she added.

John shrugged again.  “I’ll be fine,” he said, a little more honestly than he intended.

Kayo’s eyes narrowed.  “So you’re not fine now, is what you’re saying.”

John let himself bob a moment.  “No,” he admitted quietly, the word tasting like acid on his tongue.  “But I’ll be alright.  I always am.”

Kayo inched a little closer, the water lapping around her collar bone as she moved through the water.  “So not only are you not okay, but you’ve been not okay before.  And since this is the first I’ve ever heard of you being anything _but_  okay…”

John cut her off, already uncomfortable in this conversation.  “I obviously sorted it out myself then, and I’ll do it again.”  He shrugged, feeling the water splash up his neck.  “Honestly, Kayo, I’ll be fine, no need to worry.”

She smiled.  “I always worry about you boys.  Professional bad habit,” she added, canting her head to one side.  Some of her dark hair slipped free and trailed in the clear water.  “But you’d say if I could help you, right?”

John rolled his eyes skyward, feeling his arms already start to close in tight around him under the waterline.  “Sure, Kayo,” he said, trying to put some emotional space between them.  He took a deep breath, and wondered if he could ask for what he needed without coming off sounding strange, or deranged, or just stupid.

Kayo nodded.  “I’m trusting you,” she said warningly.  “Oh, screw it,” she added.  “I haven’t seen you in too long, and I know you hate it, but I need a hug from my brother, okay?”

John’s mind just whited out, completely blank as Kayo pulled him into her arms. She squeezed him once, his limp arms pinned to his side.  “Sorry, I know you don’t like…” she began as she let him go.

John’s movements didn’t come from his brain but from some more primal form of muscle memory.  Kayo’s comment was cut off in an undignified squeak as John grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her in tight.  But instead of pushing him away, her arms returned around his waist, and she rested her cheek against his shoulder.

He hoped the splashes of water they had kicked up would hide the fact that he was crying and couldn’t seem to stop, but his ragged breathing gave him away.  “John?” Kayo asked softly, concerned.

“Please,” he begged.  “I know…just…please?” he finished lamely, willing his arms to go slack, giving her space to pull back, to get away.

She went only as far as she needed to rearrange their limbs so that she was holding him, her fingers twining up the nape of his neck as she guided his chin to rest on her shoulder.

Wet skin pressed onto wet skin, and it felt to John like a monsoon after a drought, an overload of sensation that threatened to flay him from the inside out.  He could feel the tiny tremors running up and down the muscles of his long bones, and so could Kayo judging by the way she ran her free hand up and down his arm, from elbow to shoulder.

The hug went on for a very long time.

When they finally pulled apart, both moving on some unacknowledged sign, John felt wrung out and limp.  He felt his arms cross themselves loosely in front of his chest, suddenly embarrassed, unsure how to make this less awkward.

Kayo’s head was bowed, her hands clasped loosely, one in the other, in front of her face. “Kayo?” he asked softly.

“Bettter?” she asked briskly but not unkindly.

John nodded, mutely.  He couldn’t feel the knives anymore, but he knew that they’d be back.

Kayo looked up, eyes soft and smiling.  “Good.”  She brushed past him and swam for the ladder, leaving him alone in the centre of the pool.  John stared at the ripples in the water until her shadow fell across him.  He looked up to see her standing on the edge of the pool, a towel wrapped tightly under her arms.  “If you get to be not alright again, let me know,” she said.  She waited for John to nod, and then she was gone in a whirl of wet hair and quick footsteps.

John sank down until his nose was just above the waterline and let his body resettle.

He’d start the count again tomorrow.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> so this seemed to want to keep going

Three months, twelve days.

It’s winter on the Island, for all that means at this latitude. But the air is a little less steamy, the sun a little less intense, and for that John is grateful for it as he strips his uniform and changes into civilian clothes.

Kayo was waiting for him when he steps out of his room, standing with her back against the wall, one leg raised to press the sole of her foot against the wood paneling.  She raised one eyebrow but otherwise remains still as John froze in his doorway.

He tried a smile.  “I am well aware this is the last thing some men ever see.”

That provoked an honest grin out of her. Kayo’s smiles are all the more beautiful for their rarity, but John will never tell her that.

Things already were kind of weird between them, and had been for months.  John hated that his weakness caused it.  He tucked his hands up under his armpits. keeping himself contained.  “Well, great chat, Kayo, but I’ll be going now.”

The flat of her hand made a noise like thunder as it slammed into the doorframe by John’s ear, blocking his escape.  Her other hand hit the other side a moment later, a split second before he could turn and flee.  Her face was inches from his, and he either had to yield ground or face the very real possibility that she’d headbutt him into compliance.

He stepped backwards slowly, Kayo stalking his every step.  The door swung shut behind her.  “John,” she said firmly.  “Do you need a hug?”

John tried not to wince.  “Kayo, I’m fine.”

Kayo’s fingertip, jabbed right in the soft part at the front of his shoulder, had he sprawling onto his bed.  “The thing is, John,” she continued in a sweetly calm voice that belayed steel underneath.  “Is that when it comes to this, I’m not entirely sure I can trust your judgement.”

John pushed himself up into sitting, perched on the edge of his bed.  “My body, my choice?”  He didn’t mean it to come out as a question, but the end of the sentence curved upwards regardless.

That earned him another smile.  “Always,” she said, and John knew she meant it.  “But somewhere along the line, I suspect you’ve developed the erroneous impression that you don’t need this…” her eyes narrowed.  “Or that you don’t deserve it.”

John clenched his jaw to stop himself from turning away.  “I’m fine,” he repeated, feeling his muscles start to ache with the effort of holding himself steady.

Kayo watched him for a moment.  “Liar.”

John forced himself to meet her eye.  “Kayo,” he sighed.  “This is my reality.  I need to learn to deal with it.”

She cocked her head to one side.  “I never would have thought you a fatalist, John.”

He shrugged, well aware that Kayo could read his closed off body language, the way he was starting to hunch in on himself under her laser focus.  “I’m a realist,” he corrected her. “I can’t…give, the way most people can,” he managed, the words dragging themselves out of him. “And since we’re being so honest, let’s just say that I am well aware that I am not the easiest person to get to know, even without…” he waved briefly at his uniform, draped over the back of a chair.  “But this is who I am, Kayo,” he finished forcefully, willing her to understand.  “I need to accept it, good and bad, and move on.”

Kayo looked unimpressed. “So that’s your plan? Cut yourself off from the world so it doesn’t hurt as much?”  She shook her head in disgust.  

John stared at her boots, suddenly too tired to pretend.  “It always hurts,” he admitted softly.  “Every time they flinch away, every time someone hugs everyone in the room but me, every time they pull back rather than risk getting close to _me_.”  He closed his eyes and tried to steady his voice.  “I don’t know what people think, but I notice, Kayo.  Believe me, I notice, and it _hurts_.”  He breathed in through his nose, letting the air fill him like a balloon so that his spine straightened and his defenses hardened.  “The trick is not to let yourself notice how much it hurts.”

Kayo’s face was unreadable.  “John, we don’t…”

He stood, so quickly that Kayo had to leap a step back.  “I’m sorry I imposed my issues on you,” he said, almost formally.  “It won’t happen again.  Now if you’ll excuse me.”

He was aware, down to the microscopic level, of the millimeters between them as he brushed past her and left.

Kayo dropped down to sit on the edge of his bed and buried her face in her hands.


	4. Chapter 4

Grandma got Scott’s attention by slapping him around the back of the head.  “Family meeting, come on.”

Gordon was rubbing the back of his own skull, but obediently shuffled along to make room for Scott to sit down.  “So what’s the emergency, Grandma?” he asked in his best ‘talking to meetings’ voice.

“Wait,” Alan interjected from the floor, where he had propped himself up against Virgil’s knees.  “John’s not here yet.”

“It’s about John,” Kayo said seriously.

Gordon laughed.  “Oooh,” he crooned saucily.  “Is John in trouble?”

Kayo didn’t laugh.  “Yes,” she said, so flatly it knocked Gordon’s smirk off his face.  She swallowed hard.  “And it’s our fault.”

“Wait, what?” came the chorus of the room.  Virgil sat forward and spoke for all of them.  “John’s fine.  I just saw him.”

Kayo shook her head.  “John’s trying to pretend he’s fine.”  She bit her lip for a second.  “I need to tell you what happened three months ago, but before I do, I need you not to take it in the wrong way.”

Scott felt the furrow between his eyes deepen slightly as Kayo quickly told the story.  “Wait, so all this is because you gave John a hug and he…ran away?” he tried.

Gordon snorted.  “Sounds like John to me,” he quipped.

Scott elbowed him in the ribs.  “Kayo, we’re trying here,” he said, tone conciliatory.  “But right now, I’m not seeing what the problem is.”

Kayo folded her arms.  “When was the last time any of you gave John a hug, or anything even remotely in the vicinity of any kind of sustained touch at all?”

Her question provoked another round of snickering and brotherly eyerolling.  Kayo held firm, as steady as a statue.  “Kayo,” Virgil.  “John isn’t much of a hugger.  Or much of an anything-to-do-with-human-contact kind of guy,” he added after a moment’s thought.

She fixed him with a hard stare.  “Are you sure?”

Alan was thinking, his fingers tangled and fidgeting.  “He doesn’t seem to like anyone getting closer,” he began, sounding small and uncertain.

Kayo’s arms dropped, and with it the tough girl persona. Left was their sister, looking worried and too-sad.  “He said, and I quote, that it hurts him too much.” She sighed.  “To be honest, I think he’s got himself convinced that he doesn’t deserve affection anymore.”

She took half a step back at the force of indignation that rose up from the four men sat before her, and she had to raise her hands to calm them.  “I said that’s what he thought, I didn’t say I believed it.”

“That’s stupid,” Gordon spat.  “How can he…urgh,” Gordon broke off with a snarl as he flopped backwards.  “Stupid idiot overthinking everything.”

Alan was still thinking, his fingers woven into a two-handed fist.  “Has anyone even, like, hung out with him recently?”

The entire room fell silent as they all thought back and came up empty-handed.  “No, this is stupid, we must have,” Gordon exploded.

Grandma finally spoke up.  “Doesn’t matter,” she cut him off.  “Doesn’t change the fact that Johnny’s got his head up his ass-” Alan snickered, ducking his head at Kayo and Grandma’s twinned glares.  “And it’s up to us to fix it.”

Scott stood decisively.  “At least the fix is easy.  Come on,” he said, waving his brothers after him.

“Scott,” Kayo said warningly, walking quickly to catch up with him in the hallway.  “Be careful, he won’t…”

“Kayo,” Scott said with a smile and a little shake of his head.  “It’s John.  We know him, we’ve got this.”

Kayo watched them storm off like a herd of excited puppies, feeling the acid roil warningly in her stomach.  “Why do I think they don’t know him, and they haven’t got this?”

Grandma Tracy patted her arm consolingly.  “Because you’re a bright girl.  Come on, before this gets beyond our ability to repair.”  More slowly, the followed the noise out onto the deck.

John was backing away slowly, his book discarded on the ground next to his chair.  Scott was watching him carefully.  “John?” he asked, sounding confused.  He half-turned to Kayo.  “I don’t think my plan is working.”

“You think?” Kayo said so sarcastically that Scott looked abashed.  

John glanced between them, then flashed Kayo a look of such complete and utter betrayal that she almost stumbled.

“John,” she said quickly.  ”I’m sorry, I was just worried…”

The rest of his brothers were looking at her, and John took the momentary lapse in concentration and jinxed sideways, slipping past Virgil and making it halfway around the pool before he turned to face them once more.  “Whatever this is, stop it,” he said with a vehemence they rarely heard from him.  He paced slowly away from them, towards the stairs that led down to the beach.  “Please, just stop.”

“John,” Kayo called out, and he shook his head, looking past her.

“I thought you were many things Kayo,” he told her.  “But I never thought you were this cruel.”

In the stunned silence that followed, he turned and strode down the path.  A second later the foliage had taken him and he disappeared from view.

Gordon looked from the path to Kayo and back again. “What in the world just happened?”

Kayo slapped his shoulder hard enough to send him stumbling, and ran after John.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *sings* this is the fic that never ends...*

Kayo almost tripped over him.  He was sat on the sand where the path ran out, in the deep shade of the tree line, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head bowed so she couldn’t see his face.

She could see the shaking of his shoulders though, and that threw her.  John never really seemed the kind of strong emotion, let alone crying jags.  She dropped to her knees on the sand a little apart from him and waited to be acknowledged.  “Sorry,” he muttered, never lifting his head.

“You keep apologizing for things that aren’t your fault,” she told him mildly.

That evoked a bitter laugh.  “Oh, I think it’s fairly clear who the common denominator is here, Kayo.”

Kayo bit her lip, trying to judge the safest move.  “You seem rather determined to take blame that isn’t yours,” she noted.  “Rude,” she added, and that got a small snort of a laugh.

John finally sat up. He looked terrible, his red-rimmed eyes standing out against pale skin.  “Then at least I’m doing _something_ ,” he said with a gallow’s smile.  “You know,” he added, almost conversationally.  “I was actually having kind of a good day, too.”

Kayo acknowledged the hit with a brisk nod.  “To be fair, I didn’t expect Scott to run off and just tackle you,” she added with an apologetic shrug.

“Scott?” John replied drolly.  “Run off with a bad plan and a lot of enthusiasm?  No, that doesn’t sound like him _at all_.”

“Is this sarcasm I see before me?” Kayo teased.  “But the fault is mine.  I should have predicted that, and I am sorry.”

John breathed deep, letting it out slowly.  Kayo had heard that sound before, over her comms when things were getting tense, but in all those times she’d never seen his face.  She could almost watch him forcibly taking his stresses and, one by one, put them aside until once again his face was a mask.  He breathed in again.  “Accepted.”

“Not going to apologize for worrying about you though,” she added.

John rolled his eyes, but he was smiling softly.  “I suspect that’s a case of potato/potatoe,” he noted wryly.  “But I’m not something you can fix.”

“You make it sound like you’re broken.”

John shrugged and said nothing, his fingers dragging lightly over the sand as he scraped patterns onto the surface.

Kayo’s eyes narrowed.  She rolled onto her knees, crouching to force herself into John’s line of sight.  “Just to let you know?  You’re scaring me a little right now.  And I don’t like being scared.”

John laughed, bitter and with the faintest note of hysteria.  “Noted.  The rest of you seem to manage yourselves just fine.”  He exhaled hard, his long limbs straightening out in front of him for a moment.  He stretched, then pulled himself back together.  “And I will be fine too.  I will be fine,” he repeated.

Kayo raised one eyebrow.  “Wow, that was almost convincing.”  She leaned in again.  “Your brothers are up there, offering exactly what you need.  Why not go take them up on it?”

John shook his head hard.  “It’s…I don’t know if I can explain it,” he said, sounding frustrated with himself.  “It’s…wrong, somehow.”

Kayo felt herself getting frustrated again.  “What about one at a time?” she tried

John looked up at her wryly for a moment then turned away, brushing a hand through his hair.  “No matter what you try Kayo, I can guarantee at best there will be ugly crying.”

“Hey,” she said, sitting back.  She’d caught movement in the trees out of the corner of her eye.  “No judgement here, and maybe crying will do you good, even though I have no idea what you are talking about.”

John flicked up a little arc of sand, his shoulders growing tense.  “I know how many languages, and I don’t know the word for this,” he almost spat.  John always hated not knowing, Kayo remembered suddenly. He looked up at the sky through the trees, as if seeking inspiration.  “It’s…it’s not freely given, and it’s not exactly pity, though there is something of that.  It’s the way they joke about it, and the way they paw at me.”  He winced like he had a bad taste in his mouth.  “Do you know what happens, when you’re cut off from anyone else? Physically I mean?” 

He pinned her with an intense look, and all Kayo could do was shake her head slightly, no.  

“First, you just become more aware, like touch is turned up a little more than your other senses.”  He folded his legs loosely, arms draped over his knees.  “Then as the weeks become months, there’s this pressure, right?  Like your skin is trying to touch itself from the inside out. And the longer you leave it, the sharper that pressure becomes, like large knives just-” and here he ran the edge of his flat hand along the top of the sand, leaving a smooth and level surface in its wake.  “ _Scraping_.  Under your skin.  All the time.”

John spoke like he was describing some interesting scientific process.  Kayo thought it sounded like torture.

His smile was almost gentle as he studied her face.  “And when someone touches you the wrong way, well.”  He leaned forward, putting all of his weight onto the edge of his hand, which sank quickly through the soft-packed sand.  “It doesn’t feel nice.”

Kayo breathed a curse.  “Oh god, John.”  She reached for him on instinct, then froze.

John blinked slowly.  “And there’s the hesitation.” He smiled gently, consolingly.  “Everyone always flinches.  Always.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> let's call that done :)

It was Alan, just like she knew it would be.

John was bent over, chest against his knees again, the words he’d just said hanging like a guillotine’s blade in the air between them.

Kayo knew she wasn’t the only one to have heard, and she probably should feel guilty for not telling John that she alone wasn’t witness to his confession. But she was a Thunderbird, and they saved people.

Even their own stupid brother, if needed.

Alan approached slowly, soundless on the sand. He had eyes only for his brother. Kayo held herself still and watched, ready to step in if needed, but trusting Alan’s instincts.

Behind him was their Grandmother, steady on Virgil’s arm, with Scott and Gordon at the rear.

Alan slid onto the sand next to John. John flinched as he realized suddenly he wasn’t alone, but Alan didn’t seem to notice. Kayo was expecting a patent Alan hug, all arms and legs and enthusiasm, but instead Alan continued his controlled slide until he was laying down, pressed lightly against John’s side.

He and Kayo were the only two close enough to hear the soft, high noise John made at the back of his throat. But he didn’t pull away, and Alan didn’t try to press in closer.

Kayo breathed out.

Grandma patted Virgil’s arm as she let go, stepping the last few paces alone to sit companionably at John’s other side.

He turned, but whatever he was about to say died unspoken as his grandmother reached out to him.

Kayo watched Grandma Tracy gently run the pads of her fingers over the shell of John’s ear, a feather-light touch. Only because he was facing her could Kayo see over Grandma’s shoulder the way John’s expression just shattered.

She’d heard that noise from John before, months ago in the pool. She hoped this was the last time she’d ever hear it again.

Grandma didn’t react, didn’t flinch. She just gently continued her ministrations, her fingers catching the tips of his hair. John sighed and his head fell forward onto her shoulders. She made gentle, soothing noises, rocking slightly on the sand as her hand buried itself in the hair at the back of his scalp. She pressed her cheek in, laying a gentle kiss in the air above his skin.

John didn’t seem to notice his other three brothers come to sit around them, close enough to touch if John chose.

Kayo spun on the spot, stretching out to lay back until the hair on the crown of her head just brushing John’s leg. She felt someone touch her arm, and looked over to see Virgil watching her. He gave her a nod of thanks, and Kayo smiled and settled in more comfortably, ready to stay with John as long as he needed.


End file.
